POP/ROCK

Corinne Bailey Rae, "Black Rainbows" (Thirty Tigers)

The British singer dynamites her own musical past and embraces a larger historical one on her new album. With her self-titled 2006 debut, Bailey Rae established herself as an agile, airy-voiced pop songwriter; it reached No. 1 in her home country, Britain. Her big hit "Put Your Records On" cheerfully but unmistakably called for celebrating a Black heritage.

Bailey Rae hasn't rushed her albums. Her second one, "The Sea" in 2010, dealt with her grief — at 29 — at the sudden death of her first husband, saxophonist Jason Rae. For her 2016 album, "The Heart Speaks in Whispers," she followed record-company advice to return to polished pop-soul love songs. By then she had married S.J. Brown, who has co-produced "Black Rainbows" with her.

On "Black Rainbows," Bailey Rae boldly jettisons both pop structures and R&B smoothness to consider the scars and triumphs of Black culture. "We long to arc our arm through history," she sings in "A Spell, a Prayer." "To unpick every thread of pain."

The songs on "Black Rainbows" flaunt extremes: noise and delicacy, longing and rage. In some, Bailey Rae reclaims her distant punk-rock past, when she was in a band called Helen. Others summon retro elegance, toy with electronics and move through multiple transformations.

The album has a conceptual framework. Most of its songs are inspired by artifacts Bailey Rae saw at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago, a former bank building that now holds a huge repository of African and African-diaspora materials: art, books, magazines, music and what the arts bank calls "negrobilia," everyday objects that perpetuated Black stereotypes.

An ashtray in the shape of a Black child with an open mouth was a touchstone for "Erasure," a pounding, screeching, distorted rocker about the exploitation of enslaved children; Another, more ebullient rock stomp, "New York City Transit Queen" commemorates a cheesecake photograph of Audrey Smaltz, the Black teenager who was named Miss New York Transit in 1954.

While Bailey Rae allows herself to shout on "Black Rainbows," she doesn't abandon the graceful nuance of her pop past. In the shimmering, billowing "Red Horse," she envisions romance, marriage and family with a man who "came riding in/in the thunderstorm," cooing, "You're the one that I, I've been waiting for."

"Black Rainbows" is one songwriter's leap into artistic freedom, unconcerned with genre expectations or radio formats. It's also one more sign that songwriters are strongest when they heed instincts rather than expectations.

JON PARELES, New York Times

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